I was so excited to see the recent announcement of the curatorial team for the 2021 Les Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la Photographie . I experienced this festival for the first time while living in Bamako between 2013 and the end of 2016, it was curated and conceived by the late great, Bisi Silva.
It is hard to put into words how amazing this festival was and the people it brought to Bamako. It was such an amazing feeling to be moving around with all these creative Africans and to be playing a bit of a tour guide since I had been in town for almost a year by the time the biennial came back around.

Although the Biennale focus was photography there were so many other art-related events around the city and even at the Musee National; I think it is was here where I met Abdoulaye Konate for the first time. I would later write a poem about 2 of his works, click here to check out the poem. It was also at this time that I become closer with a collective of young Malian artists lead by painter, Amadou Sanogo, calling themselves Atielier Badialan 1. It was an exciting time to be there.

Today all that excitement came rushing back when I saw the announcement of the curatorial team led by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung ,an amazing curator and arts administrator based in Berlin (shout out also to Anna Jager, for our awesome conversations about poetry when we met in Bamako).

My excitement went up another level after perusing the Biennale’s website and finding an essay explaining the “full concept” of the show. The overarching theme of the show is written in the Bambara “Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono” which translates to “The Persons of The person are Multiple in the Person.” To see the show titled in Bambara was amazing on its own, but my eyes and heart exploded to see that the curators had chosen to open the essay with excerpts from the work of Sonia Sanchez.

This is exactly the kind of bi-directional exchange that I am hoping to support, foster and document over at Black Ekphrastic This is particularly exciting because Sanchez’s work is in a sense being used as prompt and guiding principle for the artists to think about the work they will submit.

To me this continues to drive the point that the work of African (Continental and Diasporic) creative writers are vital and can been seen ad utilized as critical texts in how we understand African art making and cultural work..

Looks like I am going to have to dust off my passport and head back over there for this one…